About those Plattsburgh workers

The city's staffers at the Municipal Lighting Department offices were nothing short of heroic this past week. Forced to deal with the GOP tax bill confusion, the office was swamped with requests to pre-pay 2018 tax bills before 2017 expired, as well as the usual utility-bill drop-offs.

The city workers responded with professionalism and good humor, and I was able to get in, clarify my billing, pay and go on my merry way, all within 15 minutes.

Contrary to what some may think, the staffers were, in a word, productive.
I hope they're all enjoying a great New Year's weekend. They earned it.

Umm, no

This is the one where Mayor Doctor Professor Read doesn't look too smart. (OK, another one.) He staked quite a bit of regional political capital on getting $10 million out of the Town of Plattsburgh. That's $10 million that apparently doesn't exist, as Joe LoTemplio reports:

The original PILOT that was eventually agreed upon called for the city's share to be $850,000 per year for 15 years, Curtin said.
"They were lucky to get that," he said. "The property was never in the city, and they (city officials) were holding it hostage by threatening annexation. It was a money grab, that's all."
Curtin said the 15-year-deal was probably too long at the time, as most PILOTs are for only five or 10 years.
He noted that the plant has barely operated since the lucrative deal to sell electricity to NYSEG ended in 2009, and it isn't producing anywhere near the revenue it once did.
"There shouldn't even be a PILOT for that property anymore. It should be on the tax rolls, and the city would get nothing because it is not in the city, and it never was."

But by all means, Mr. Mayor, spend a bunch of what, by your own pants-crapping account, is a dwindling tax base on legal fees to fight for this money, which actually wasn't ripped off because it wasn't ever the city's to begin with.

Sustainable!

The mayor looks at life from both sides now

Give Plattsburgh Mayor Colin Read credit for this much: He can't be shamed.

At the first Common Council meeting since last week's viral (for Plattsburgh) hot mic moment, Read apologized to city workers, sort of. "Some of the workers who listened to that thought that somehow I didn't respect their value and contribution to the city, and nothing can be farther from the truth," he said.

This from the man caught on his own city video feed condescendingly mulling the merits of "the guy who sits on the back of a garbage truck all day," and concluding that guy was "probably not" getting more productive.

Somehow, people concluded that showed a lack of respect. In Read's world, those people are wrong.

And in a sense they are. Because Read is hard to pin down. Like an electron obeying the laws of quantum physics, he appears able to occupy two or more different places at once. He has a habit of saying one thing, then saying something completely contradictory, and proceeding as if there's nothing strange about that. He can respect city workers while saying utterly disrespectful things about them.

His multiple, simultaneous views on dissolving the city serve as another example. During his conversation with "Hot Mike" Kelly, Read embraced dissolution. In his City Sun column this week, he initially staked out the position that this was a brave stand.

Somebody took exception that I’m willing to utter the word *merger. I don’t find that word threatening. Indeed, perhaps a dozen people have since told me that they were glad somebody was willing to mention the unmentionable.

(*Read never uttered the word "merger" in the hot-mic video. Also, for those new to his oeuvre, Read's columns are filled with unknowable pronouns. "Somebody" is a frequent source, often a critic. So are "people." They are never named, but we are to assume they are trustworthy experts hewn from sturdy moral timber. Also, unspecified "things" often appear in his columns, many of which we should "do" to be "sustainable." Moving along...)

A brave stand, indeed! Read has grabbed with both hands the third rail of local politics--consolidating the city and the town!

Let's do this, then! What's his next sentence say?

Let’s be clear, though. The city is not going away... 

Oh. Buzzkill. The piece concludes:

Dissolution is unnecessary. Dialogue is. We all want a city for our next generation of workers and residents, and must plan accordingly today for a city forever.

What happened to the merger, and the brave stand at the ramparts? I'm confused.

But sowing confusion is the mayor's genius. Take the hot mic itself. He seems not to acknowledge  that the city's video stream, the city he ostensibly runs, caught his conversation with Kelly. He initially said "someone" (perhaps a close and evil relative of "somebody") put it on YouTube, trying to make it about nefarious enemies rather than his own failure to push the power button.

Read even doubled down, as NCPR's Zach Hirsch put it, on his hot-mic take in a conversation with reporters after the council meeting last night.

And, speaking with reporters after the meeting, he reiterated concerns about the fact that a private conversation was made public. He said the situation has even caused a “chilling effect.”
“Now my councilors are saying to themselves, ‘jeez is it safe to talk here? Should we go over here, should we go over there, is there a microphone in this room?’ We’ve completely chilled the ability of my councilors to have conversations and that really troubles me,” Read said.
(Read's private conversation with Kelly occurred in the Common Council's weekly meeting room, where there are microphones and cameras in plain view. All meetings are streamed live on YouTube. The video that's circulating was originally recorded on the city's own feed.)

Kudos to Hirsch for that necessary parenthetical paragraph. It's an antidote to the gaslighting that's been a fixture in city government for the past year.

The local press corps will need to do more of this in covering the Read administration, and its upcoming decisions on sales of city property, the now-contentious relations with the Town, and the state of the city's finances--which the mayor is making out to be an apocalypse.

Reality check, please.

Hot mic, dim bulbs

Plattsburgh politics are weird. It's an overwhelmingly white city near the Canadian border, surrounded by woods and farms where one often sees big Trump signs and the occasional confederate flag.

Yet Clinton County, in which Plattsburgh is by far the biggest municipality, went for Hillary Clinton in 2016--the only county north of New York's I-90 corridor to do so. 

Meanwhile, the city's Common Council is majority Democrat, with candidates who run spouting liberal catch-phrases such as "progressive" and "cooperation" and "community."

Colin Read was one of the candidates who mouthed those buzzwords during his 2016 mayoral campaign. In his swallowed professorial voice, he spoke of the importance of vision and planning in reinvigorating the city.

He even dropped the term "millennials" when he threw his hat in the ring last year, hoping to make Plattsburgh a place that could draw those young mysterious kewl kidz.
















It was positive, feel-good rhetoric, and it helped Read narrowly upset  the incumbent, Jim Calnon, last November.

So, one year into your administration, how's that millennial appeal working out for you, Mayor Read?

Young Mr. Bond is on to something. Read's tenure thus far has been nothing but gloom, doom, slashed programs and broken promises. He changed the City Charter with little discussion so that he could cut the City Recreation Department and the Engineering Department, all as a sop, he said, to credit ratings agencies and to prevent a tax increase. Then he raised taxes as the city's credit rating was downgraded. He improbably promised that the Rec Department's death wouldn't result in a cut in services, and then, less improbably, this happened.

The coup de grace for the mayor's and the city's terrible 2017 came after last week's Common Council meeting, when Read and Councilman Mike Kelly forgot to turn off the City Hall meeting room's streaming video feed, and decided to go full 13-year-old mean girl.

For more than 20 minutes, the two public officials whine and moan and grouse on a publicly funded, universally available video stream. They complain about city workers ("the guy who's sitting on the back of the garbage truck" is "getting less productive over time") and mull giving employees "bribes" to claw back some of their benefits. They bitch about officials in the neighboring Town of Plattsburgh ("they tricked us" out of "millions of dollars"; "it stinks to high heaven"). Most alarmingly, with a "whaddayagonnado" callousness (starting at about 13:40 on the video), they conclude the City of Plattsburgh itself would be better off if it were "dissolved."

Dissolved. As in shut down, and folded into some other entity, presumably the Town of Plattsburgh--the place with all those crooked officials.

The mayor of the city advocates for his city to cease to be, and for handing his constituents over to people he clearly can't stand. That's bizarre. Even for Plattsburgh.

It gets weirder. There is a conspiracy theory that Read did the old "hot mic" trick on purpose, like canny Jed Bartlet in that "West Wing" episode, as part of a media campaign to gin up his fight over the Town's alleged chicanery. The convoluted controversy, which involves shared revenues and a decade-old PILOT program, is too byzantine to render a judgment on who did what to whom without a deep dive into documents, which Read has yet to provide. But it was the first thing local media reported on after the hot mic became public, and Read was able to cast Town officials as villains for a few days. So score one for the mayor, I guess.

Undermining the conspiracy theory is that Read, the guy who forgot to turn off the camera, ran to his fainting couch over the fact that his camera was turned on. He protested that he and Kelly (whose nickname shall forever after be "Hot Mike")--two city officials in a City Hall meeting room discussing city business--were having "a private conversation." The city scrambled to take down the conversation Thursday night, and the mayor cast blame on whoever put the video back on YouTube, saying it "breaks some sort of ethic" and is "obviously trying to harm the city."

Which is weird, coming from a person seemingly bent on harming the city by, you know, killing it.

Actually, maybe none of this is weird at all. Maybe it's just incompetent.

Drones, in Adirondack Life

I used all my willpower to resist a pun in the headline and now present you with a story that has all of New York buzzing. (With a hat tip to the outstanding editing team at Adirondack Life magazine, a publication which, by the way, you should subscribe to.)